de Campian adj.

Man the Space-Rockets: 80. De Campian logic—interesting if true...

With the Dark Ages about to fall, with Italy about to be ruined by the successive invastions of the Byzantines and the Lombards, it is up to Padway to save his own skin and to prevent Darkness from falling. Just how he does this is told in the best deCampian style, so well known to readers of fantasy. The book moves quickly, with no pauses for breath, but nowhere does Mr. de Camp lose his reader. In fluent, racy fashion, with liberal sprinklings of humor—quite often, delightfully ribald—he leaps from incident to incident.

The Finance Committee lamely laments that goats are needed, and therefore the most active fans (evidently meaning those publishing and contributing to fan-mags) are the logical candidates. Oh Yeah? If that’s logic, it’s the de Campian variety.

[T]his is a cops-and-robbers adventure on a planet whose natives are still in a pre-industrial stage of development. It involves a hunt for the runaway daughter of a rich Levantine (Earthian) who has eloped to said planet with a typical de Campian adventurer named Fallon.

Where Burroughs’ heroes were more muscular than smart, and relied heavily on the fact that a Good Guy will always come out on top in a tussle with a Bad Guy, de Campian heroes have muscles but are often too modest to use them, treat their crises more as acrostics than as brawls, and are apt to be startled if a door breaks down when they put a shoulder to it and shove.

He [sc. Robert E. Howard] also understood the de Campian notion of strengthening the illusion of a genuine historical context by the use of cross-references between stories: the same ballad, ‘The Road of Kings,’ is used epigraphically in another Conan story, ‘The Scarlet Citadel,’ as are some Aquilonian proverbs and a marching-song sung by the Bossonian Archers.

Alan Garner gives the fascinating story of his own mental set and the interrelationship between his emotional state and his creative work. In the process, he comes head-on into opposition with the de Campian notion that neurosis equals creativity, and the greater the neurosis the greater the creativity.

Our hero finds himself inhabiting the body of a bishop and caught up in the politics of this new world. Like any de Campian protagonist he is tough, inventive, cheerful, a regular guy only a lot smarter, and he makes the best of things.

Though a host of great work was done during the amazing Golden Age period, the main players were Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, and de Camp. [...] And through it all, Sprague de Camp won a large and enthusiastic readership with a multitude of stories marked by high erudition and a wry comic sense, stories so characteristically de Campian that one could identify his hand after reading only a paragraph or two.